


name one hero who was happy

by mapped



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Established Relationship, Fluff, M/M, Pre-Series, The Iliad, with a dash of angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-20
Updated: 2017-06-20
Packaged: 2018-11-16 13:19:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11253765
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mapped/pseuds/mapped
Summary: Lying in bed together, James and Thomas talk about theIliad. (Thomas is practically ready to write Achilles/Patroclus fanfiction.)





	name one hero who was happy

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Palebluedot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Palebluedot/gifts).



> Happy birthday, Audrey darling! <3 I hope you like this!
> 
> Title from _The Song of Achilles_ by Madeline Miller.

“ _Come, my friend. You too must die. Why moan about it so? Even Patroclus died, who was a far, far better man than you._ ”

James shudders against Thomas’ shoulder. The morning outside is smeared with fog, as grey and cold as the room. A boy is begging for his life at Achilles’ feet, and Achilles is pitiless and sneering, because the best man he has ever known is dead, and all the world must die with him.

Thomas puts down the book and runs a hand through James’ hair, and much-needed warmth diffuses down James’ spine. “Did you know that there’s a version of the myth where Helen was never in Troy, but was in Egypt all along, and it was only a false phantom of her in Troy those ten years? And that there’s an Iphigenia who never died at Aulis, but who was whisked away by Artemis at the last minute, a deer sacrificed in her place?”

“I know,” James says. “I know my Euripides, my lord.” He hides a small smile against Thomas’ skin, lips just kissing Thomas’ collarbone. He still likes to address Thomas that way occasionally, especially when Thomas is asking him a question that coming from the mouth of any other nobleman would be a snide assumption of his ignorance, but coming from Thomas’ mouth is a simple, innocent question with no preconceived judgment hovering upon whatever the response may be.

Thomas swats his arm, tugs lightly on his hair so that James tilts his head up and Thomas bends his for a quick, biting kiss. 

“Well,” Thomas murmurs, fingers tracing down James’ neck, like the slow trickle of raindrops, “why not let us entertain the notion that Achilles and Patroclus never went to war, that they stayed in Thessaly and grew old together, that Achilles never strangled a river in his grief over Patroclus? The Patroclus and Achilles in Troy were only likenesses of them made by the gods. The real ones were safe, and happy, and never fell beneath the walls of Ilium.”

“I don’t think they would have liked that very much,” James says, even though it sounds beautiful to him, this vision of two men loving each other decade after decade, far from the fields of battle, never having to learn what a ship smells like when it is burning, or what it is to have no hope of ever returning home. “What of glory and honour? Besides, Achilles was no mere mortal. He would have outlived Patroclus, and grieved anyway.”

“But a full life,” Thomas insists, drumming his fingers on James’ sternum now. “A full life, shared in peace. Better that than to lose your love too early, too young. Surely!”

His fingers cease their motion, and James, glancing up, is caught breathless in the oceanic intensity of Thomas’ eyes, as though his heart has forgotten how to beat properly without Thomas conducting it.

“Achilles wasn’t made for peace,” James mutters, looking down again, though it is no easier this way, with all of Thomas’ lovely languid body in view, the stardust scatter of down on his chest and below his navel, growing into a tawny nest of hair upon which rests his soft cock, and those long pale legs. “He was made for destruction.”

James wasn’t made for this either, for lying in bed with one of Thomas’ arms draped around him. It’s too much, too overwhelming. He feels radiant all the time, a joy too big for his body, as if Thomas had stolen the sun from the sky and slipped it inside his ribcage while he was asleep that first night they spent together. No wonder London has been so dark these past few weeks.

James isn’t looking at Thomas, but he hears the frown in Thomas’ voice: “You don’t believe he could have lived a life of peace if war hadn’t come knocking?”

“War _did_ come knocking,” James says. “And he answered it of his own will. He chose his premature death. He chose the clash of swords and the call of trumpets.”

“Perhaps. But he wasn’t made for destruction. Nobody is. We all have the ability to choose otherwise. Achilles chooses otherwise—”

“Briefly,” James cuts in. He loves the way the words fly from both their mouths when they’re in disagreement about something. “It’s nothing but a momentary truce after which the slaughter begins afresh.”

“He _chooses_ compassion and forgiveness. Empathy. Mercy.”

“Yeah,” James says, “after he’s dragged Hector’s corpse in the dust for twelve _bloody_ days.” 

Thomas huffs a sweet breath of laughter that James feels against his ear. “You don’t think it’s crucial to the message of the poem, how Achilles relents in the end and recognises that he is not the only one who suffers, and that the grace which we can bestow upon one another is the only thing that lifts the pall of human suffering?”

“I think it’s crucial,” James says. “I just…” _Worry that I wouldn’t stop at so little, were I Achilles._ He doesn’t know where the thought came from, and it frightens him. “I just think it’s bleak. There’s this short-lived respite, but we know that the war carries on, and they’ll die. Achilles. Priam. Troy is ravaged. Nothing changes, fundamentally.”

“You’re telling me a little light in the shadows doesn’t change anything?” Thomas asks.

James looks at Thomas again. Thomas is… _everything_. More than a little light in the shadows. And James—James has been changed. By Thomas and Miranda both. By the determination with which Thomas pursues his lofty ideals, by the bravery with which Miranda asserts her own place in ther world and refuses to shamed for it, by the honesty with which they both love him, pure and true and searing, like no feeling James has ever known.

In their presence, James can sometimes glimpse what a world entirely without shadows might look like.

“I just prefer the _Odyssey_ ,” James says, quietly, gazing at Thomas’ fine lashes. “He gets to live, and go home.” 

Thomas’ eyes crinkle softly, and he presses a smiling kiss to James’ temple; the sensation of it blossoms white on James’ skin, like milk poured into tea. “But Achilles and Patroclus,” Thomas says. “Didn’t they leave an impression on you?”

Too deep an impression, James thinks. It carved such a ravine of longing through him when he was a boy, a dry, hollow ravine that had never felt the flow of water until Thomas kissed him for the first time. Now it brims and floods, gushes and cascades.

He only says, “They did.”

“How old were you when you first read the _Iliad_?” Thomas asks, slender fingers stroking along James’ arm.

“Fifteen, I think,” James says.

“Did you know that Achilles and Patroclus were in love, even when you were fifteen?”

James, who has been watching every fascinating shape of Thomas’ pink, distracting mouth, closes his eyes. He remembers being fifteen. He remembers his awe at how wild and feral and _elemental_ Achilles became after Patroclus’ death, remembers the dull horror of seeing Achilles weeping and howling and covering himself in dirt, slicing a blood-soaked path through the Trojans, consumed by grief and rage in deadly concert, more monumental than any tomb.

All the words that dripped as tears from the warrior’s mouth: when Achilles receives the news and yearns to die at once, since he let Patroclus be killed when he could have saved Patroclus; when Patroclus’ spirit visits Achilles in the night and asks that their ashes be mingled in one urn, and Achilles goes to embrace him but is left with empty air, because Patroclus is but an intangible shade, a ghost that evanesces like smoke and cannot be held.

Every time Achilles speaks of Patroclus.

 _The man I loved as my life._

_My dear companion, equal to my own life._

_And though in the halls of Hades the dead forget the dead, even there I shall remember him._

James always knew. He remembers wanting to know what it must be like to love someone that much, and fearing it at the same time.

He nods mutely, clutches Thomas’ hand to his chest. Thomas smooths his fingers over the hairs there, idly rubbing his thumb over James’ nipple and making James shiver.

“I went to see it on my Tour,” Thomas says. “The tumulus of Achilles. It’s rather unremarkable. Just a mound of earth with some trees growing atop it. Green fields all around. But… I stood there, and I felt it.”

“Felt what?” James asks.

“The echo of a love that reaches beyond death and time. A love that is there even at the end of all things.”

James snorts. A second too slow, because his heart is thrilling with siren-song. Thomas’ words are ridiculous. But Thomas himself, earnest and golden-haired, makes James wants to believe in a love that endures. A love that will not allow itself to be severed by anything.

Thomas’ hand is gentle on his cheek, but his eyes are fierce with promise. James has been learning to read them as well as he reads the sea.

“You cannot tell me you are not moved by the mere thought,” Thomas says.

“I don’t suppose there’s any way the Church will let us be buried together when we die,” James tries to joke, but it comes out too solemn, and Thomas’ face falls open like a book.

“James,” Thomas says, surprised affection in his voice, as warm as roasted chestnuts in the deep of winter. “My love.”

“Thomas,” James says, and—to Hell with it, he’s already being too serious. He sits upright so he can brush his forehead against Thomas’, a gesture that has become almost ritual for them. “Equal to my own life.” 

They kiss, and it is a red, red kiss, like a seal, lips seeking to sink their singular marks into each other’s soul, and James knows he will keep the memory of it with him forever. It will not vanish even in the underworld, when all other things have melted from his mind like butter on his tongue.

 

(Years later, when Alfred Hamilton pleads for his life, James thinks, _Even Thomas died, who was a far, far better man than you_ , and lets his sword hand swing.)

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are truly cherished and loved! <3 Please come find me on [tumblr](http://reluming.tumblr.com/) where uhhhh I guess I'll still be posting Black Sails till the end of time.


End file.
